Lifespan Development of Memory

When was your first memory? How old were you? We have believed that younger children had a harder time remembering things because they don’t retain it in their long-term memory. However, as it turns out, children encode fine; it is their inability to recall information. They just do not use the strategies we develop around the age of eight, those being rehearsal and organizational techniques (i.e. linking similar events together, seeing causal relationships).

Kail and Hagen (1982) found that when testing recency, which is testing what they recently saw or experienced, five-year-olds performed just as well as adults. So it appears that they seem to have equal brain development when it’s concerning recent memory. They do not perform as well when the time duration between the event and the testing increases (cited in Dworetzky 1989).

Researchers (Rovee-Collier 1999) have found that even infants have some retention of memory. (Cited in Ornstein & Haden, 2001) For example, if a ribbon tied to an infant’s foot is connected to the mobile above the crib, the infant will learn that by kicking her foot, she can get the mobile to make movement. Two to three year olds will retain this information or response for several days and some, even weeks as long as they are exposed to this scenario some during the period. Thies and Travers (2001) believe that mental life begins as the infant interacts with their physical environment. They will look for events that correlate. This implies that they are able to store information and retrieve it.

Bauer (1995) found that two year olds were able to respond to events based on their prior experience to similar events. (Cited in Ornstein & Haden, 2001) “I saw that box last time and there were toys in it, there are probably toys in it now.”

Another reason that children are able to perform some memory tasks and not others is because of what the content is. Recognition, relying on perception and sensori-motor skills alone, is easier than say, evocation, which requires language, or mental imagery of things unknown to the child. (Piaget 1969) Recognition, but not evocation, is found in organisms other than humans as well. (Piaget 1969)

As memory and cognitive ability is always increasing from infant stage to adulthood, an older child will be able to perform better than a younger child in how many things they can imitate, their reliance on reminders, and how much information they will know.

Reese et al. demonstrated in their studies that children whose mothers spoke more elaborately to their children about past events or other things had children who were better able to recall such information and also had better skills for remembering than those whose mothers did not. (Cited in Ornstein & Haden, 2001)

Piaget studied the development of memory over the course of a lifetime and broke the stages into four periods: sensorimotor period (birth to two years), preoperational period (two to seven years), concrete operational period (seven to twelve years), and formal operational period (twelve years to end of lifespan).

These four periods can be summed up with what is going on at that particular time, how the person is learning. The sensorimotor period is mostly a reactive stage, in which the child is physically ‘feeling out’ her mental capabilities and begins to imitate that which she sees. The preoperational period is mostly the development of mental imagery. Language is growing and communication becomes more concrete. The concrete operational period finds the child able to have mostly normative memory and cognitive processes, but is unable to find the overall picture of how things interrelate. The formal operative period is this last stage, where the individual can think of all perspectives and see the overall concept in what she is learning. She is able to think of things in a hypothetical or theoretical context as well. Basically, the abstract thought has developed.

So why do adults do a better job remembering? It’s possible that because adults use scripts, they therefore have better efficiency of retrieving. A script is basically like a movie script, except it’s what happens in different situations in your life. You know when you go to the movies, the procedure you go through: buy a ticket, hand the ticket off to get ripped by an employee, she gives you instructions to the room that is playing your movie; you consider buying popcorn and think about the calories, etc. Scripts are for any part of your life.

Children would have difficulty in developing scripts, wouldn’t they? They haven’t experienced very much at their ages, so how could they possibly have the “usual scenario” in their mind?

As adults age, their memories fade. This is usual, as the connections we have aren’t being activated, so it becomes harder and harder to retrieve the information. Try to remember what your best friend’s name was in high school. Had to think about it for a second? Or a minute? The information is still there, that is important to stress, but the connection is weak.

Likewise, as adults try to recall information that they’ve forgotten, they often replace the missing parts with “recollections” of what they believe must have happened. This isn’t to be confused with lying, as it’s not a conscious effort to deceive, but it’s rather a recall adaptation that uses scripts. It’s what is supposed to have happened as based on their scripts (Cited in Dworetzky 1989).

Also, as age increases, a person’s encoding efficiency will decrease (Dworetzky 1989). One of the reasons this occurs is because older people tend to not use mnemonic devices or efficient organizational strategies. A mnemonic device is anything a person uses to aid their memory. On the following link, some common strategies are listed that you might be familiar with, others might be new, check it out and see if there’s any new ones you can try.